I had to re-install rvm on my MacBook because my gemsets were a bit messed up, and I thought I should start over with a clean install. I just rm -rf‘ed ~/.rvm, and then went ahead and re-installed it according to the instructions at https://rvm.io/. Installed ruby 1.9.3, and the openssl package as described here. But after that, both gem install and bundle install started failing because the SSL certificate from https://rubygems.org couldn’t be verified. Couldn’t quite figure out what was wrong. But, after a bit of googling, found out a way to skip the SSL certificate checks.

To skip the SSL certificate checks, just add this line to your .gemrc

:ssl_verify_mode: 0

This causes the gem and bundle commands to skip SSL certificate verifications when fetching them from a HTTPS source.

Of course, you can also bypass the error by using a non HTTPS URLs for your gem sources in your Gemfile (when using bundler). So, something like:

source 'https://rubygems.org'

in your Gemfile, will become:

source 'http://rubygems.org'

Neither of these actually fix the problem. They just avoid SSL certificate checks, or use a non SSL source. I still don’t know what went wrong during the re-install.